In the last post, I talked about writing actions alongside dialogue — the two-column approach that eliminated my fumbling and dead time. But I glossed over the most important part: just how detailed the action column needs to be.
I glossed over it because, frankly, the level of detail I am about to describe sounds insane to anyone who has not tried it. It sounded insane to me when I first encountered it. Writing down which hand holds a prop? Fine, that makes sense. Writing down where each finger goes? Writing down the exact angle of your body relative to the audience? Writing down the speed at which you extend your arm?
That sounds like the work of someone who has lost perspective. Someone so deep in the weeds that they can no longer see the forest. Someone who has mistaken obsessive granularity for useful preparation.
I thought all of those things. And then I did it anyway, because the results at the coarser level of detail had been so good that I wanted to see what happened when I went deeper. What happened changed how I think about performance preparation entirely.
The Professional Detail Gap
There is a level of physical specificity that separates amateur performances from professional ones, and it is not visible to the audience as a single thing. Nobody watches a performance and thinks, “Ah, his right hand was precisely positioned at forty-five degrees — how masterful.” That is not how it works.
What the audience perceives is something much vaguer and much more powerful: smoothness. Confidence. A sense that the performer knows exactly what they are doing. An absence of hesitation, fumbling, or uncertainty. The performance looks inevitable, like it could not have gone any other way.
That perception of inevitability is the cumulative result of hundreds of small physical decisions that were made in advance. Each individual decision is trivial. But together, they produce an effect that is anything but trivial. They produce the difference between “that was impressive” and “that was effortless.”
Ken Weber insists on this level of detail in his scripting methodology. Write down which hand holds what, where the volunteer stands, how the prop moves from one position to another. Pete McCabe reinforces the same idea from a different angle: write from the audience’s perspective, which means thinking about what every physical action looks like from out front, not just how it feels from behind the prop.
When I first combined these two principles — Weber’s physical specificity and McCabe’s audience-perspective writing — I realized I had been preparing my routines from the inside out. I knew how the routine felt to perform. I had no idea how it looked to watch.
My First Detailed Action Script
I chose a routine I performed regularly at corporate events. A mentalism piece with several physical phases — there were props to manage, a volunteer to position, and several moments that required precise timing between what I said and what I did.
I had been performing this routine for months. It worked. Audiences responded well. I was comfortable with it. Which is exactly why I chose it — I wanted to see what detail scripting would reveal about a routine I thought I had already mastered.
I sat down in a hotel room in Graz — the same desk where I had written my first dialogue script months earlier — and I began describing every physical action in the routine. Not in general terms. In exact terms.
Here is the kind of detail I mean. Instead of writing “Pick up envelope,” I wrote: “Right hand reaches to table, picks up envelope by the short edge between thumb and first two fingers, lifts to chest height, turns body fifteen degrees left to face volunteer, extends envelope toward volunteer with a slight forward lean.”
Instead of “Give pen to volunteer,” I wrote: “Left hand offers pen to volunteer, held horizontally at the volunteer’s natural hand height, cap pointing toward the volunteer for easy grip. Make eye contact during handover. Wait for volunteer to grip pen before releasing. Right hand gestures toward the writing surface, palm up.”
Instead of “Walk to center stage,” I wrote: “Three steps toward center, starting with the left foot, pace relaxed, arriving at center mark facing the audience directly. On the third step, turn forty-five degrees to open body toward both the volunteer and the audience. Pause for one beat before speaking.”
Reading this back, I understand if it seems pathological. But stay with me.
What the Detail Revealed
As I wrote these descriptions, something remarkable happened. I started noticing physical problems in the routine that I had never seen before.
The first discovery was about body angles. In several moments during the routine, my action script revealed that I was turning my back to a portion of the audience. Not fully — more like a quarter turn. But enough that people on the far side of the room were seeing my shoulder instead of my face during a key moment. This had been happening for months, and I had never noticed because I was thinking about the volunteer, not the full audience.
The second discovery was about hand traffic. The detailed scripting revealed that at one point in the routine, I was transferring a prop from my right hand to my left hand and then immediately picking up another prop with my right hand. This transfer was unnecessary — I could have simply held the first prop in my left hand from the beginning, eliminating the transfer entirely. But because I had never mapped the choreography in detail, the inefficiency had become habitual.
The third discovery was about timing. There was a moment where I spoke a line, paused, and then performed a physical action. The pause was wrong. The action should have started during the line, not after it. Writing the actions in parallel with the dialogue — beat by beat, synchronized — made this timing error obvious on paper, where it had been invisible in performance.
None of these were catastrophic problems. But “works fine” and “works beautifully” are separated by exactly this kind of detail. Each issue is barely noticeable alone. Together, they are the difference between a smooth performance and a merely competent one.
The Audience Perspective Test
McCabe’s principle — write from the audience’s perspective — became my editing tool for action scripts. After writing down what I was physically doing, I went back through and asked: what does this look like from out front?
This is harder than it sounds, because your instinct is to describe actions from your own point of view. “Right hand picks up the deck” is a performer’s description. It tells you what your hand does. It does not tell you what the audience sees.
What the audience sees is a visual composition. A picture. At any given moment, you are a figure in a frame, and everything about your body — your posture, your hand positions, your angle, your eye line — contributes to that picture. The question is not “am I doing the right thing?” The question is “does this look right?”
I started adding a third element to my action scripts: the visual note. After describing the physical action, I would add a note about the intended visual result. Something like: “Audience sees: performer facing them squarely, both hands visible and empty, envelope resting on the table between performer and volunteer. Clean, open body language. No crossed arms, no hidden hands.”
This visual note forced me to think like a director rather than an actor. It pulled my perspective out of my own body and placed it in the front row of the audience. And from that perspective, problems that were invisible from inside became glaringly obvious.
I discovered that a gesture I thought looked expansive actually looked jerky and rushed. That a moment of “strong eye contact” was actually my gaze darting between the volunteer and the prop. That my “relaxed” stance involved crossed ankles that made me look like I was about to tip over.
The Freedom on the Other Side
Here is the paradox that I keep returning to, because it is the most important thing I have learned about performance preparation: the more detailed your planning, the more free you become in performance.
Every physical decision I made on paper was a decision I did not have to make on stage. And the accumulation of those premade decisions was transformative. During performances, my body ran on a kind of autopilot — not robotic, not stiff, but practiced and automatic. My hands knew where to go. My feet knew where to stand. My body knew which direction to face.
This freed my conscious attention for the work that actually matters: connecting with the audience. Reading faces. Adjusting my pacing to the room’s energy. Responding to unexpected moments. Being genuinely present.
Before action scripting, I was splitting my attention between logistics and connection. Part of my brain was always managing the physical performance — where is the prop, where should I stand, which hand needs to be free for the next move. With detailed action scripts, that logistical work moved from conscious processing to rehearsed habit.
The difference showed in my performances. At a keynote in Vienna, I performed a routine that involved complex staging — a volunteer on stage, multiple props, several position changes. Throughout the entire routine, I maintained eye contact with the audience. Not just glancing out — genuine, sustained eye contact that moved from person to person, connecting with individuals. I could do this because I did not need to look at my hands. I did not need to check my table. I did not need to consciously think about where to stand. All of that had been scripted, rehearsed, and automated.
After the talk, someone told me that my magic “felt personal, like you were doing it just for me.” That feeling — the feeling of personal connection in a room of two hundred people — is not the result of charisma or natural talent. It is the result of having done enough physical preparation that my attention was fully available for the human beings in front of me.
The Objections
I know the objections because I raised them all myself.
“This will make me robotic.” No. It will make your physical performance consistent, which reads as confident and natural. Inconsistency reads as nervousness, not spontaneity.
“I’ll look rehearsed.” You will look prepared. Nobody in the audience has ever complained that a performer was too smooth.
“I don’t have time for this.” A detailed action script for a five-minute routine might take several hours to write. But you write it once and refine it over time. The investment is front-loaded; the dividends are permanent.
“My routines are too improvisational for this.” Even improvisational performances have physical frameworks. The improvisation happens in the dialogue and the moment-to-moment response to the audience. The physical framework can and should be scripted even when the words are not.
Building the Habit
I now write a detailed action script for every new routine before I rehearse it for the first time. The script comes before the rehearsal, not after. My very first physical run-through is already informed by a detailed plan. I am not discovering the choreography through trial and error. I am executing a choreography I designed on paper.
Does the choreography change? Of course. You discover in rehearsal that a movement is awkward, or a transition needs more space, or a prop placement needs adjusting. You revise and refine. But the script evolves from a specific starting point, not from a vague one.
The detail is not the point. The detail is the vehicle. The point is the freedom, the smoothness, and the audience connection that emerge on the other side of meticulous physical preparation. The point is looking effortless because you did the effort in advance, on paper, in a hotel room, long before the audience arrived.
Plan every movement. Script every action. And then forget the script entirely, because your body will remember it for you.